Renewi deploys Elastic Observability on Microsoft Azure to optimize performance of business-critical applications

Leading European recycling company Renewi gives new life to used materials

Primarily operating in six European countries, Renewi collects waste streams and transfers them into secondary raw materials such as reusable paper, metal, plastic, glass, wood, and building materials to be used in new production processes.

Waste recycling plays a central role in the transition toward a circular economy and tackling climate change by reducing methane produced by landfills and incineration sites. As an ambitious waste management business, Renewi has a recycling rate of 65 percent, with a goal to reach 75 percent by 2025.

Renewi is equally committed to the efficient use of resources when it comes to managing its information technology systems. This is where Erik Meeuwsen, IT Service Manager, and his team play a critical role maintaining the company’s databases, networks, and middleware. They are also responsible for the functional monitoring of Renewi’s business-critical applications, helping keep software such as the company’s Salesforce CRM system running smoothly without interruption.

Moving to Elastic Cloud to increase ROI and lower energy consumption

Renewi previously used a solution built in house to monitor functionality, find the root cause, and fix application issues. However, the software couldn’t easily be updated, and the technology lacked a comprehensive support framework. Meeuwsen was also concerned about vulnerabilities in the code. “We wanted to modernize and improve our approach to monitoring middleware and app functionality,” he said.

Additionally, Meeuwsen wanted to better support Renewi’s mission to be the leading waste-to-product company in one of the world’s most advanced circular economic regions. “Our job is to keep the organization running so that it can focus on the delivery of innovative recycling and waste disposal services,” he said.

Meeuwsen and his team contacted Rob van der Heiden, Account Executive at Devoteam, Renewi’s long-term technology partner. Devoteam put together a proof of concept based on Elastic Observability which unifies logs, metrics, application traces, and availability data from multiple sources. It also includes a set of easy-to-use dashboards for data visualization and analysis which can be quickly configured to the needs of different teams.

Renewi also needed to select an Elastic deployment environment. To help them with this decision, van der Heiden demonstrated an on-premises configuration alongside a deployment running on Elastic Cloud hosted on Microsoft Azure.

“When we demonstrated the Elastic proof of concepts, it quickly became clear that the Elastic Cloud deployment hosted on Microsoft Azure better aligned with Renewi’s IT strategy,” van der Heiden said. “It means that they no longer need to be involved with the day-to-day maintenance of the technology and can instead focus resources on developing innovative applications for Renewi customers and employees.”

Selecting a cloud-based solution enabled Renewi to move more of its IT infrastructure from a capital expense to a more cost-effective operating expense. This also makes IT budgets more predictable so Renewi can plan for future IT costs.

“Moving to the cloud not only increases our IT return on investment, and it also helps us reduce energy consumption and our overall carbon footprint,” Meeuwsen said. “As a waste management company, it’s important that we lead by example, and Elastic Cloud helps send a sustainability message to our customers and investors.”

Easy-to-use dashboards for non-technical users

Elastic Observability has been well received by Renewi end-user teams, the majority of whom are responsible for the performance of business applications.

These non-technical teams are confident that messages from their applications are flowing via Renewi’s middleware to other parts of the infrastructure. They now receive an alert as soon as any messaging errors occur.

In addition to accelerating fault detection and resolution, Elastic Observability on Azure helps break down barriers that occur when applications are isolated within siloes. Different teams are now more aware of business-critical interactions between their applications and other tools.

According to Meeuwsen, “Elastic Observability enables non-technical people such as functional managers to track application messaging and ensure that it reaches the destination successfully. For each team, we’ve created a dedicated space on Elastic where they can view dashboards that alert them to important messaging events.”

A platform for the future

With positive feedback from employees across the organization, Meeuwsen sees enormous potential for Elastic Observability to support other key business applications including ServiceNow, Renewi’s IT service management platform. Elastic Observability will enable Renewi to standardize and streamline ServiceNow incident management workflows and automatically forward Elastic alerts to the appropriate team for resolution.

“The great advantage of Elastic Observability on Elastic Cloud is that existing functionality monitoring can be replicated quickly while increasing data and event transparency across other applications,” Meeuwsen said. “Ultimately, it means we can support the business with a cloud-based system that is more cost-effective and sustainable than an on-premises solution.”